Gary M. Wisenbaker, Valdosta Today Opinion Contributor
The day before soldiers of the radial Islamic Wehrmacht attacked innocent Parisian concert goes and diners, American college students, self-identified as the “Million Student March”, demonstrated on over 100 college campuses demanding free tuition, an annulment of all student loan debt, and a $15 per hour minimum wage for college employees (if you detect a non-sequitur, it’s because logic courses are no longer required at the collegiate level).
No suggestions, however, on who’s picking up the tab. Guess that’s next week’s assignment.
Immediately prior to this mobilization, you may recall, protesters at the University of Missouri, Yale, Ithaca College, and other assorted venues took to their meticulously manicured campuses to assert “their right to not be offended”.
Seems that an inebriated student voiced certain racial slurs at Mizzou and a Yale professor endorsed the idea that edgy, maybe even politically incorrect, Halloween costumes were “fun” and tolerable given the holiday.
For those demonstrating, this was simply too much to bear.
Not since the carefree, willy-nilly days of the mid-70s streaker phenomenon have college youths exhibited such conviction to freedom of expression, self or corporate. Letting one’s feelings all hang out is an interesting twist to the previous generation’s physical manifestation of release.
Fighting for the right not to be offended, however, is not to be taken lightly.
Many of today’s students were raised by parents who could not countenance failure in their lives and were educated in schools where standing up for yourself in the face of schoolyard insults and bullying brought suspensions and/or counseling.
Defending yourself was once expected. Not today: doing so means redlining and attending sensitivity classes.
These kids were taught to place blame for being picked on (race, religion, ethnicity, you-name-it) and take on the victimhood mantle. Any resolution required the hand of a third party, parents, school administration, government, victims’ rights group, but never their own.
They have been taught that there is power in victimhood for once so classified, some authority will back you up, like their parents did in grade school. They are now enabled by the same college and university administrators who have pushed the victimhood paradigm in education for well over a generation
And so they demand their institutions of hiring learning create a “safe space”, a place where all is right and free, where there is no adversity nor diversity, and certainly no acceptance of individual responsibility.
More succinctly, these college and university students demand protection from the world’s reality.
President Obama is today’s university student on a world stage.
Beginning with his Apology Tour in 2009, wherein he assigned victimhood status to the Middle East because of America’s strength and exceptionalism, to his recent shameful press conference performance in Antalya, Turkey, Obama chooses, like today’s demonstrating students, to deny present day vicissitudes.
In Obama’s safe space, ISIS is equivalent to a “jv team” and is “contained” (he declared the day prior to the attacks in Paris).
And then there’s “We have the right [ISIS] strategy and we’re going to see it through” (three days after said attack) but it is “shameful” for GOP governors to turn away Syrian refugees (at least one of which has been linked to the Paris bloodletting).
After all, the Parisian massacre is little more than “a setback” in the ISIS strategy.
And, of course, “Climate change is the biggest threat to our national security.”
Aside from Jimmy Carter’s breathtakingly feeble response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics, no American president has ever exhibited such weakness in the eyes of the world.
The protesting students have time to get it right; they have their lives ahead of them.
For Obama, however, the sun is setting on his presidency. It has already set on any illusion that he can lead the free world.
Gary Wisenbaker (gary50155@gmail.com) of Valdosta, Ga., is a PR and political consultant.
